3 ms·

You perfectly summarized the reaction of any programmer looking at the work of a mathematician.

by GuB-42 2y ago

hinkley 2y ago
Math pages on Wikipedia have this bad. I don’t know whether the programming concepts pages are more sanely written or I already understand the circular reasoning. But it feels like they’re more approachable.
- rectang 2y ago
  The math pages on Wikipedia value correctness above lay comprehensibility. It's easy to understand how this happens: a learned mathematician points out that a simplification for the purposes of making an explanation more approachable is not actually correct, so the explanation gets desimplified... and repeat ad absurdum until most math pages on Wikipedia cater primarily to experts and are too advanced for a good fraction of the audience.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    But why do experts need a wiki page?
- gopher_space 2y ago
  The programming pages use symbols that exist on your keyboard and deconstruct their process. The math pages look like they’re trying to be Perl one-liners. Why is everything so jammed up, Mathematics?
  - chongli 2y ago
    Why is everything so jammed up, Mathematics? It's not. The language of mathematics is prose, usually written in English. The formulae are meant to illustrate the relationships in a very concise way but they're meaningless without the accompanying prose.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      You know… when I took the SATs I surprised myself by scoring higher on verbal than math. But it has explained so much about my subsequent interactions with my fellow nerds. So many people don’t realize prose is part of their job description and it shows. Doubly so for mathematicians. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills until I have to talk to customers or consumers and I see how they think we are all collectively nuts. They’re not wrong. In software, restating the problem or the bullshit plainly is usually the first step to eliminating or mitigating it. George Carlin and his rants about softening words until they mean nothing comes to mind all too often.
- chongli 2y ago
  I love the math pages on Wikipedia but I have a math degree. They are written (written clearly and concisely) for mathematicians. If you're a programmer (but don't have a math degree) then I would offer up API docs as a comparison. They are written for you, the user of the API, to be as concise and straightforward as possible so that you can get up and running with the API. API docs are definitely not written for beginners who have never written a line of code (or a line of code in the language the API is written in) before. If there's one complaint I may entertain, it's that Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a resource for specialists. It's intended to be an encyclopedia for a general audience. But then by that reasoning, many of these math pages on Wikipedia probably ought to be deleted outright because they're simply too specialized in the first place. So we're left with the dilemma: do we keep these articles as-is (and keep mathematicians happy) or do we delete them outright because they're too specialized? The third option, rewriting them for a general audience, is likely to run afoul of Aesop's fable #721 "The miller, his son, and the donkey" [1]. You'll get a highly technical and complex article that explains far too much and buries its insights in overly verbose and cumbersome prose (which cannot assume any prerequisite mathematical knowledge). It'll please neither the mathematician nor the general audience member. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_donkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_do...
- GuB-42 2y ago
  One of my preferred example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung#Quantum_mechanical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung#Quantum_mechani... It is actually physics, but for all I know it could just as well summon Cthulhu.

You perfectly summarized the reaction of any programmer looking at the work of a mathematician.

by GuB-42 2y ago

You perfectly summarized the reaction of any programmer looking at the work of a mathematician.

Math pages on Wikipedia have this bad. I don’t know whether the programming concepts pages are more sanely written or I already understand the circular reasoning. But it feels like they’re more approachable.

rectang 2y ago
The math pages on Wikipedia value correctness above lay comprehensibility. It's easy to understand how this happens: a learned mathematician points out that a simplification for the purposes of making an explanation more approachable is not actually correct, so the explanation gets desimplified... and repeat ad absurdum until most math pages on Wikipedia cater primarily to experts and are too advanced for a good fraction of the audience.
- hinkley 2y ago
  But why do experts need a wiki page?
gopher_space 2y ago
The programming pages use symbols that exist on your keyboard and deconstruct their process. The math pages look like they’re trying to be Perl one-liners. Why is everything so jammed up, Mathematics?
- chongli 2y ago
  Why is everything so jammed up, Mathematics? It's not. The language of mathematics is prose, usually written in English. The formulae are meant to illustrate the relationships in a very concise way but they're meaningless without the accompanying prose.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    You know… when I took the SATs I surprised myself by scoring higher on verbal than math. But it has explained so much about my subsequent interactions with my fellow nerds. So many people don’t realize prose is part of their job description and it shows. Doubly so for mathematicians. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills until I have to talk to customers or consumers and I see how they think we are all collectively nuts. They’re not wrong. In software, restating the problem or the bullshit plainly is usually the first step to eliminating or mitigating it. George Carlin and his rants about softening words until they mean nothing comes to mind all too often.
chongli 2y ago
I love the math pages on Wikipedia but I have a math degree. They are written (written clearly and concisely) for mathematicians. If you're a programmer (but don't have a math degree) then I would offer up API docs as a comparison. They are written for you, the user of the API, to be as concise and straightforward as possible so that you can get up and running with the API. API docs are definitely not written for beginners who have never written a line of code (or a line of code in the language the API is written in) before. If there's one complaint I may entertain, it's that Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a resource for specialists. It's intended to be an encyclopedia for a general audience. But then by that reasoning, many of these math pages on Wikipedia probably ought to be deleted outright because they're simply too specialized in the first place. So we're left with the dilemma: do we keep these articles as-is (and keep mathematicians happy) or do we delete them outright because they're too specialized? The third option, rewriting them for a general audience, is likely to run afoul of Aesop's fable #721 "The miller, his son, and the donkey" [1]. You'll get a highly technical and complex article that explains far too much and buries its insights in overly verbose and cumbersome prose (which cannot assume any prerequisite mathematical knowledge). It'll please neither the mathematician nor the general audience member. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_donkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_do...
GuB-42 2y ago
One of my preferred example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung#Quantum_mechanical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung#Quantum_mechani... It is actually physics, but for all I know it could just as well summon Cthulhu.